Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.
Last weekend was a pretty big one for Las Vegas. Apart from the usual collection gamblers and theatergoers, there was a big football game that you might have heard about, one for which you could bet not only on winners and losers, but on how much camera time one tight end’s girlfriend would get.
But regardless of how the game turned out, the big winner was, of course, the casinos themselves. Because as they say, the house always wins. That phrase is true in more ways than one.
The word casino is simply the Italian word for “house” — casa (from the Latin casa “cottage”) — with a diminutive –ino suffix. A casino, then, is literally a “little house.”
A mere 300 years ago, Italians might have used the word to describe an array of smaller structures, from a farm office to a lake cabin, to, yes, a place for gambling or dancing. The senses coalesced around “a gambling house” (and the word found its way into common English) around the start of the 19th century.
One wonders, then, if Laura Ingalls Wilder had set her famous novels in the Southwest instead of the Midwest, would she have called them Casino on the Prairie, and would Pa have been a pit boss?
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Comments
Well, casino (with its three syllables) certainly sounds a lot fancier and ritzier than the more mundane ‘house’. The house always wins though, does sound more serious and matter of fact when stating this AS a fact. Using the upscale Italian ‘casino’ might go over some American’s heads as being less serious (for their money losses) than the more functional, non-flashy word ‘house’ is.
Of course these days (sadly), enough might think it a reference to their own house or apartment, and not the flashy palaces they chose to gamble money away they could ill afford to lose. As far as Ms. Wilder goes, we don’t know for sure, but I think the word ‘house’ would have been used regardless of where in the U.S. the novels were set. Pa Ingalls? He had the right down-home core American values we lack today, and look where we are.